His mother’s eyes were wide as she looked between the two of them. “Bill, take a breath. Let’s calm down.”
“No, don’t bother. Let me relieve you of your hardship, Bill,” Jace said, finally regaining his voice. “Because you don’t have to call me anything from now on. For all I care, you can tell people you’re the father of two.”
“Jason, wait,” his mother pleaded.
Jace stepped around the other side of her bed and leaned down to kiss her cheek. “I love you, Ma. I’ll check on you later, but I can’t be around him anymore. I’m done.”
NINETEEN
“He’s still not answering?” Evan asked, nervously swirling her spoon in the soup Andre had insisted she eat when she’d woken up from her nap.
Andre tossed the cell phone onto the dining room table and leaned against the wall. “No. I called his sister, and she said he left the hospital over an hour ago after he had some blowout with their dad. Apparently the two have vowed to never speak to each other again.”Author: Roni Loren
She cringed. “Guess things haven’t improved with Jace and his father. They were always at each other when I lived with them.”
Andre snorted. “His dad’s a jackass. He has this amazing son who’s breaking his back to run a business he’s passionate about—with no help from the family fortune, by the way—and all his father can see is that Jace doesn’t fit into the mold he’s created for him. Jace would never admit it to anyone, but his father’s constant digs tear him up.”
She looked down at her soup. She’d woken up from her nap planning an escape route. The two men had stripped more than her clothes in that bedroom this morning. Her defenses had been left in a tattered heap on the floor, and she needed time to reconstruct them before facing either of the guys again. But the thought of Jace somewhere alone, feeling worthless in his family’s eyes, had her chest feeling tight.
She pushed her chair away from the table and looked up at Andre. “You need to go find him.”
Andre’s eyebrow quirked. “You want me to leave you to find Jace.”
She straightened in her chair, feeling more resolute by the second. “Yes. I’m not going to be able to relax and have fun here if I know he’s somewhere else feeling shitty. Go find him, take him out for a beer, do whatever guys do to make each other feel better. I’ll be fine spending the rest of the weekend in my cabin catching up on my reading.”
The corner of Andre’s mouth tilted up and he pushed off the wall. “Bella, I agree with you that Jace probably doesn’t need to be alone right now, but I’m not leaving you anywhere. You want me to find him, then you come with me.”
“What?” she asked, flustered at the suggestion of taking any of this outside The Ranch’s gates. “No, I can’t. I mean . . .” She scrambled for an explanation that wasn’t I’m afraid I’m falling for the two of you. “My agreement with Daniel is for here, not—”
He shrugged. “So don’t tell him you left. You can stay with us tonight. We have a guest bedroom if you need your own space.”
Stay with the two of them? At their place? The whole thing sounded stupid and ill-advised and way too enticing. “I don’t think—”
“Come on, bella. Let’s not pretend this isn’t the same thing under a different roof. Being at The Ranch doesn’t make what we’re doing any less real.”
She looked down at her hands. Real. That was exactly what this was. Too fucking real. “We’ll find Jace and then I’ll go home. I’ll tell Daniel I wanted to end the weekend early.”
He sighed. “How about we cross that bridge when we get to it? We need to track down Jace first.”
She nodded, feeling better now that she had an escape hatch rigged up. “Okay.”
“Get your stuff packed up, and I’ll call Grant. He’s not going to let you leave with me unless he verifies that it’s what you want.”
“What? I’m a grown woman. I don’t need permission to go with someone.”
“Here you do,” Andre said, crouching down in front of her and laying a light kiss on her lips. “Grant doesn’t mess around with people’s safety. He’ll just make sure that you’re going with me on your own volition and not because I ordered you as your dom to do so.”
She huffed. “I feel like I’ve entered an alternate universe.”
He nuzzled her neck, sending warmth trickling down her spine and beating back some of the anxiety that had crept in. “And what do you think of the natives?”
I think I’ve found my home planet. But she didn’t share that thought. “I think they’re cocky and high-handed.”
He laughed softly against her skin.
“. . . And pretty damn irresistible.” She let herself fall under the spell of his touch and laced her fingers in his hair, enjoying the satiny slide of his dark locks between her knuckles. “Well, two of them, at least.”
“That’s good to hear. We have a bit of a soft spot for you, too. In fact, I have something to propose to you on the way over.” He pulled back to look at her, his grin sly. “But if I don’t stop kissing you now, we’ll never leave this cabin. Jace will be on his own.”